The Cave & The Cloud

The Class of Prof. Simon Dybbroe Møller at The Royal Danish Academy of Art with Manuel Graf 

Victor Vejle, Martin Hasfeldt, Mikkeline Daae, Maria Lindeblad, Sylvester Vogelius, Adam Varab, Tea Eklund Berglöw, Sofus Keiding-Agger, Peter Palluth, Christine Dahlerup, Theodor Nymark, Erik Hjørnevik, Ava Samii, Lukas Danys, Andreas Hatt and Erdal Bilici

Sound: Titus Maderlechner
Voice: Erik Hansen

“We might almost call them not ‘works’ but ‘moments’ of art.”

 -Andre Malraux, Le musée imaginaire (1947)

Heinrich Wölfflin’s 1896, How One Should Photograph Sculpture was a manual of sorts, a set of instructions on ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ reproductions of sculpture. Wölfflin favoured frontal views and silhouette-like shapes. This notion of proper photographic depiction has progressively been codified through the promulgation of online blogs and platforms, where images on Contemporary Art Daily and its descendants repeat the same spatial and formal notions of the ‘good image’. Today artworks and exhibitions are commonly produced with this photographic image in mind. All art today exists in a limbo between the flat images and digital data that operate before, during, and after any artwork and the embodied physical context of art—its spaces, its sensory information, its limits. 

In 1974, the French novelist, art theorist, and minister of cultural affairs André Malraux analysed that the proliferation of photographic reproductions of art and cultural artifacts had rendered the museum inherently deficient, that no museum could hope to house the ‘universal world of art’, as it now included phenomena that spanned all coordinates of space and time. He suggested that we have all now developed our own musée imaginaire, a compilation in our minds unique to each viewer. Dislocated and decontextualized, abstracted and homogenized, with photographic reproduction all things could be compared, contrasted, exchanged, replaced, and valued.  Furthermore any embodied encounter was already mediated through this encyclopaedic archive of images. We know this to be true today. It is trite to say that no one can see everything in person. The vast majority of art that we experience is through install shots, repros, and details flickering by during our marathon smartphone scrolls. No matter our insistence on presence and on the sensate physical experience of the museum visit, it remains framed through a photographic view. 

The prevailing tropes in the history of museum design have largely mimicked or retrofitted existing spaces as signals of art’s development: from the palatial villa (turning the private into the public, as a symbol of the state and its fantasies), to the temple (the secularization of the sacred, the sacralization of the mundane), to the warehouse/factory (a sign of shifting relationships to labour), to the refashioned armoury (tying the museum to war). In the modern age, these spaces were progressively emptied and standardized, yielding innumerable variations of the proverbial white cube; the idealized and universal any-space-whatever of contemporary art, free from worldly contamination and specificity. Once an appeal to art’s autonomy, it rendered the exhibition space a neutral backdrop. A backdrop that allows any work to become an isolated image infinitely exchangeable with any other, and extends the gallery room of the universal museum we call “contemporary art” into every pocket of the globe. This standardization and digital capitalism’s infinitely expanding and omnipresent archive of photographic data has not produced a “museum without walls” (as Malraux’s concept is often erroneously translated in English), but instead an endless white plain, a singular wall without limits.     

Designing the Museum Abteiberg in the 1970s, the architect Hans Hollein went against this tendency by generating a multidimensional configuration of spaces of different volumes, producing a “deliberately staged correspondence between space and work of art.” The museum is a view finder, a framing device that produces contingent, embodied, and subjective encounters. Sure, the rooms are uniquely photogenic, yet they betray and thwart conventions of art documentation by always insisting on their presence, intruding into the images. While most exhibition architecture is but a mere slave to the photographic, this fragmented and idiosyncratic building stands its ground awash in mystery. 

Hollein described the concept of the Museum Abteiberg as an ‘adventure’. And how does one traditionally convey such an adventure? Through the slide show, those proto-cinematic loops of isolated still testimonies used in amateur travelogs, and art history classes. THE CAVE AND THE CLOUD is a narrated slideshow through a digital reproduction of Museum Abteiberg. A group of artists have produced works, that respond to the mediated physical rooms of the digital environment, to the museum’s histories and to its spaces. Exaggerating the speculative and projective possibilities of computer-assisted modelling, Manuel Graf produced a faithful 3D CGI model of the Museum Abteiberg, within which the other artists situated their works. This digital double, increasingly used by artists and exhibition makers, allows for photographic vantage spots to be mapped out prior to concrete presence, turning the exhibition itself into a reproduction.

THE CAVE AND THE CLOUD is a trip down memory lane, a traversal through the complex structure of our physical and mental museums, art’s habitat. Each of the artworks accentuate the mystery of Museum Abteiberg, exaggerating the ways its non-linear paths of discovery seem to anticipate game design and cinematic tropes. While some of the interventions exploit the logics of repetition, scale, and world-building in the model itself, others displace or mirror architectural logics from one place to another, contaminate the space with material fabulations, or cycle through relationships between images, objects, and language. Conflating architectural and photographic representational space, the tour tests the very status of site-specificity today. The narrator in the presentation laments the museum’s demise, its progressive ruination due to technological change, and holds Hollein’s design as the “last truly new contemporary art museum”, as it emphasizes concrete presence and subjective experience. The anachronism of physical architectural space is set into contrast with the universal, all-encompassing, imaginary museum that is the internet, that infinite space of correspondences and images that we all hold in our hands and draw from. Perhaps the museum is not gone nor obsolete, but its role in art has certainly changed. It has been eaten by the photographic, turned into a background for images. We find ourselves not in a museum without walls, but within a profusion of surfaces unencumbered by time, space, or reality itself.  

About The Cave & The Cloud

Since 2019, the School of Sculpture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, under the leadership of artist Simon Dybbroe Møller, have examined the relationship between the weightiness of things and the flat logics of the photographic image by looking at the world through specific case studies. Their ‘prism’ for the last academic year was the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach. Designed by Hans Hollein, this labyrinthine structure, entirely embedded in and protruding from its location, with its montage-like combinations of materials that frame its post WWII contents is an icon of postmodern museum architecture. To aid in this investigation, the artist Manuel Graf, himself invested in the space between digits and mud, conducted several workshops and seminars with the students analysing the ways that photography has profoundly influenced its seeming antithesis: sculpture. Contemporary art is dependent on documentation to prove that something did indeed take place in a specific place and time. More than simply replacing the need for art to faithfully represent, photography has radically changed how art is conceived, made, and apprehended. It has been instrumental in formations of style (of noting correspondences outside of time and place), and has provided a universal endpoint for all art activities: the image.

– Post Brothers

In cooperation with:
Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts

With friendly support by:
Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf